It means you cannot put a password or API key inside your code and access the drive files. The way the latest version (V3) of drive API works is only through OAuth. I: Register a google app by visiting the Google API console:

Since I couldn’t find any such tutorial online, I thought about writing one myself. The so called quickstart for drive api shows some example code, but what I needed was a step-by-step tutorial of how to go about doing it. However, a good documentation to implement this in a backend app, especially a python web-based app is very much lacking. This method of authentication is called OAuth and is very much needed for implementing the drive api.

The major challenge for me was to authenticate to google and access the drive on the user’s behalf once they grant permission to my app. In my last project, I had to develop a python flask app for my users that required to access the files stored in their google drive account. This is the first in a series of articles for web programmers that explain in detail about using the Google Drive API in your web applications to access files/folders on behalf of the users of your application.

Python google drive api upload file